The War of the Worlds / Война миров. Книга для чтения на английском языке - Уэллс Герберт Джордж

Herbert George Wells / Герберт Джордж Уэллс

The War of the Worlds / Война миров. Книга для чтения на английском языке

Подготовка текста, комментарии и словарь Е. Г. Тигонен

Об авторе

Английский писатель-фантаст Герберт Джордж Уэллс (1866–1946) родился в семье садовника и горничной, служивших в богатом поместье, позже они стали владеть небольшой лавочкой фарфоровых изделий. Но торговля шла плохо, и семья в основном жила на деньги, которые отец зарабатывал, играя в крикет.

Образование Уэллс получил в классической школе Мидхёрст и в Кингз-колледже Лондонского университета. После ученичества у торговца мануфактурой и работы в аптеке побывал учителем в школе, преподавателем точных наук и биологии. В 1893 году профессионально занялся журналистикой.

В 1895 году вышел в свет первый роман Уэллса – «Машина времени». В нем рассказывалось о путешествии изобретателя в отдаленное будущее. Затем последовали «Остров доктора Моро» (1896), «Человек-невидимка» (1897), «Война миров» (1898), «Первые люди на Луне» (1901). Писатель снискал славу самого значительного экспериментатора в жанре научной фантастики. Впоследствии в произведениях подобного рода, например в романе «Мир освобожденный» (1914), он сочетал научную достоверность с политическими прогнозами о грядущем всемирном государстве. Тезис о науке, способной создать всемирное государство, в котором человек сможет разумно пользоваться своими изобретениями, с воодушевлением повторяется во всех книгах Уэллса, однако его оптимизм, до той поры безграничный, сокрушила Вторая мировая война, после чего он дал волю отчаянию и в книге «Разум на краю своей натянутой узды» (1945) предсказал вымирание человечества.

Уэллс жил в Лондоне и на Ривьере, часто выступал с лекциями и много путешествовал, был дважды женат. Умер в Лондоне 13 августа 1946 года. Согласно завещанию, после кремации его сыновья Джордж Филип и Фрэнк Ричард развеяли прах отца над Ла-Маншем.

* * *

«Война миров» – один из первых научно-фантастических романов, в котором рассказывается о нападении на Землю пришельцев с Марса. Роман был неоднократно экранизирован и инсценирован, в том числе и на радио. В 30-е годы приемник стоял в каждом американском доме, поэтому нет ничего удивительного в том, что нация узнала о постигшем ее бедствии именно из радионовостей. Воскресным вечером американцы включили канал CBS. Из сообщений можно было заключить, что на восточном побережье происходит нечто ужасное. Диктор ровным голосом сообщил о высадке марсиан. В городе началась паника, а режиссер Орсон Уэллс и актеры его «Меркьюри-театра» не подозревали, что происходит на улице. Они никого не собирались пугать, но слушатели поверили, что на Америку действительно напали марсиане.

Потом газеты долго ругали режиссера за безответственность, а к CBS было предъявлено множество исков о преступной халатности. Но страсти быстро улеглись – американцам, видимо, стыдно было вспоминать о своей доверчивости.

Book One

The Coming of the Martians

But who shall dwell in these worlds if they be inhabited?… Are we or they Lords of the World?… And how are all things made for man?

Kepler[1] (quoted in The Anatomy of Melancholy)

Chapter One

The Eve of the War

No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man’s and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. With infinite complacency men went to and fro over this globe about their little affairs, serene in their assurance of their empire over matter. It is possible that the infusoria under the microscope do the same. No one gave a thought to the older worlds of space as sources of human danger, or thought of them only to dismiss the idea of life upon them as impossible or improbable. It is curious to recall some of the mental habits of those departed days. At most terrestrial men fancied there might be other men upon Mars, perhaps inferior to themselves and ready to welcome a missionary enterprise. Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us. And early in the twentieth century came the great disillusionment.

The planet Mars, I scarcely need remind the reader, revolves about the sun at a mean distance of 140,000,000 miles, and the light and heat it receives from the sun is barely half of that received by this world. It must be, if the nebular hypothesis has any truth, older than our world; and long before this earth ceased to be molten, life upon its surface must have begun its course. The fact that it is scarcely one seventh of the volume of the earth must have accelerated its cooling to the temperature at which life could begin. It has air and water and all that is necessary for the support of animated existence.

Yet so vain is man, and so blinded by his vanity, that no writer, up to the very end of the nineteenth century, expressed any idea that intelligent life might have developed there far, or indeed at all, beyond its earthly level. Nor was it generally understood that since Mars is older than our earth, with scarcely a quarter of the superficial area and remoter from the sun, it necessarily follows that it is not only more distant from time’s beginning but nearer its end.

The secular cooling that must someday overtake our planet has already gone far indeed with our neighbour. Its physical condition is still largely a mystery, but we know now that even in its equatorial region the midday temperature barely approaches that of our coldest winter. Its air is much more attenuated than ours, its oceans have shrunk until they cover but a third of its surface, and as its slow seasons change huge snowcaps gather and melt about either pole and periodically inundate its temperate zones. That last stage of exhaustion, which to us is still incredibly remote, has become a present-day problem[2] for the inhabitants of Mars. The immediate pressure of necessity has brightened their intellects, enlarged their powers, and hardened their hearts. And looking across space with instruments, and intelligences such as we have scarcely dreamed of, they see, at its nearest distance only 35,000,000 of miles sunward of them, a morning star of hope, our own warmer planet, green with vegetation and grey with water, with a cloudy atmosphere eloquent of fertility, with glimpses through its drifting cloud wisps of broad stretches of populous country and narrow, navy-crowded seas.

And we men, the creatures who inhabit this earth, must be to them at least as alien and lowly as are the monkeys and lemurs to us. The intellectual side of man already admits that life is an incessant struggle for existence, and it would seem that this too is the belief of the minds upon Mars. Their world is far gone in its cooling and this world is still crowded with life, but crowded only with what they regard as inferior animals. To carry warfare sunward is, indeed, their only escape from the destruction that, generation after generation, creeps upon them.

And before we judge of them too harshly we must remember what ruthless and utter destruction our own species has wrought, not only upon animals, such as the vanished bison and the dodo[3], but upon its inferior races. The Tasmanians[4], in spite of their human likeness, were entirely swept out of existence in a war of extermination waged by European immigrants, in the space of fifty years. Are we such apostles of mercy as to complain if the Martians warred in the same spirit?